July 2010

The Police Radio Incident

The Police Radio Incident

Oct. 9, 2009

It's fall of 1964 and I'm involved in a
revolution. I'm on campus at Berkeley, though I have no classes –
it's the work phase of my work-study program and I'm employed as a
lab helper working for Dr. Westheimer in the Physiological Optics
lab. The revolution is the Free Speech Movement, a 3-month-long
struggle to roll back new university rules that would have banned
organizing civil rights protests on campus. It's serious because
Freedom Summer has just concluded and some of the voting rights
workers didn't come back alive.

You can learn the particulars at the
website of the Free Speech Movement Archives (www.fsm-a.org).
Revolutions generate lots of stories, and this one is just a snapshot
from that time, though an important one to me. I feel justified in
using the term because revolutions, 1) involve the actions of a large
number of people, and 2) overthrow an existing order, in this case
the order of “in loco parentis” by which the university arrogated
to itself many rights of parenthood.

The FSM headquarters is in a small
house in the South Campus student ghetto. Its occupants – major
figures in the initial explosion of protest – have retreated to one
or two rooms and dedicated the others to organizing the protest
activity. The place is full pretty much 24 hours a day and even has a
self-appointed housemother named Marilyn Noble directing people here
and there. Marilyn is a grad student in sociology and her father is a
mechanical engineer who worked on the original Douglas DC commercial
planes in the 1930's.

I am hanging around trying to find some
way to apply my skills, such as they are. I'm 19, a sophomore in EE,
totally intimidated by all these brilliant grad students in fields I
do not understand – sociology, psychology, political science –
areas dealing with human behavior and relationships unknowable to me.
Maybe some of these brilliant people will tell me what they need to
have done, and I'll do it.

In the meantime, I gravitate toward the
non-existent card file system and attempt to improve it. I want to
try my hand at implementing McBee “keysort” cards. These are card
with holes punched around the periphery. If you stack the deck square
they all line up and you can put a knitting needle through the deck.
If you pull up on the needle all the cards will come with it.

If you had punched out the cardboard
from a hole to the edge then the card with the punch would not come
with the needle when the deck is lifted by that hole. By clever
definition of hole fields you could do binary sorting and have a
very large sort space. But first you have to have the cards to punch.

I try my hand at taking a stack of
index cards and using an electric drill to bore holes through. Don't
try this – it only produces holes filled with wood pulp fuzz. The
term “drill” is used with paper where the term “punch” ought
to be used. You also have to take great care that the cards don't
shift and put your holes out of alignment when you're making them.

Still, it keeps me occupied and there
might be something more successful I can do. One evening there's a
commotion - a group of students burst through the front door shouting
about how the police have surrounded the campus. We all freeze –
Berkeley's campus is very large and the logistics involved in
surrounding it would be tremendous. Everyone wants to know what is
actually happening.

Marilyn Noble takes the lead, turning
to me. “Quick,” she says, “make us a police radio!”

At this point I enter a surreal space,
somewhat at variance with the experience of everyone else. It seemed
to me that everyone in the house had barked those words at me in
unison. I immediately knew what they were talking about – 25 years
earlier police radio was positioned on the spectrum immediately above
the 530 – 1700 Khz AM broadcast band. It was possible to take the
case off any AM radio, re-tune the local oscillator to a higher
frequency and hear the police traffic.

However, 25 years has passed, and the
police band has moved up to the 30 – 50 MHz range and gone to
narrow-band FM – a totally different proposition. Modifying an FM
receiver would be a real problem and require some redesign. I recall
that there had been a construction article in one of the electronic
hobbyist magazines with plans to build just such a receiver. But you
couldn't just snap your fingers and create it.

I try to explain, with all eyes on me.
What comes out is a stammering, “You..you don't understand...it
takes time..” The crowd all seems to answer in unison again -
“Never mind about that! Make us a police radio!”

At that instant two things happened in
my mind. At the practical level, I started a project to build a
police radio from that construction article. At a deeper, more
visceral level, I was stunned to discover that my strategy of
“waiting for orders” was fatally flawed. Those frighteningly
sophisticated students, knowledgeable in the many ways people
interacted, had turned out to be woefully ignorant of anything having
to do with technology. If I were to put myself at their disposal it
would be guaranteed that I would be working on the wrong thing, too
little and too late.

The realization continued,
crystallizing at the same instant - I would have to make my own
decisions on what technology to pursue that would support the causes
I hoped to assist. I would have to take the time required to gather
the knowledge and skills, to design and build and test and re-design,
to organize the best ways to get things made in the necessary
quantities, all without the “leaders” understanding what I was
doing. Then, when the demand arose, I would be able to respond,
“Well, you can't have that but here's what you can have!”

Whether I wanted it or not, whether I
felt qualified or not, I would have to take the lead in any work I
did in developing technology for use in society. I could see the path
I'd have to take, and it involved educating myself in many of the
mysteries of human behavior along with the arcana of technology. It
was daunting, but it was better than waiting for orders.

It turns out that revolutions have a
third characteristic – they open previously unsuspected ranges of
possibilities for their participants and others. The Free Speech
Movement won on December 8, 1964 with a vote of the faculty senate
that demolished the edifice of “in loco parentis” and demanded
that the only authority over civil behavior on campus be the civil
authorities, under the Constitution. The crowd of students waiting
outside the hall where the senate met formed corridors and applauded
the faculty as they emerged.

A few months later I heard a talk from
one of the grad students commenting on what had happened that
mobilized tens of thousands of students, who were otherwise
strangers, to create a community focused around the protest. He said
that “barriers to communication between students had come down”,
and that anybody could talk to anybody else about the crisis without
an excuse. I took that observation and began a long process of trying
to find out how to make that an everyday situation, and what
technology would be appropriate to that purpose.

If I hadn't had that surreal
experience, evoking that instantaneous conclusion, I don't know what
I would have become. For the participants, it seems, revolutions
never really end.

Comments

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Of course, communication infrastructure is one of the first targets of any invading military force to control or destroy. Therefore, one may say, a nationwide cellular network would not survive the depredations of any military force.

About Lee Felsenstein

Based in Silicon Valley, Lee currently does electronic product development, due diligence, expert witness assistance as well as speaking engagements and participation in conferences such as the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conferences. The most unusual places he has spoken were at the Waag in Amsterdam and a squat in Milan, Italy.
He was named the 2007 "Editor's Choice" in the Awards for Creative Excellance made by EE Times magazine. He holds 12 patents to date.